Enhancing Spatial Association Rule Mining in Geographic Databases

The association rule mining technique emerged with the objective to find novel, useful, and previously unknown associations from transactional databases, and a large amount of association rule mining algorithms have been proposed in the last decade. Their main drawback, which is a well known problem, is the generation of large amounts of frequent patterns and association rules. In geographic databases the problem of mining spatial association rules increases significantly. Besides the large amount of generated patterns and rules, many patterns are well known geographic domain associations, normally explicitly represented in geographic database schemas. The majority of existing algorithms do not warrant the elimination of all well known geographic dependences. The result is that the same associations represented in geographic database schemas are extracted by spatial association rule mining algorithms and presented to the user. The problem of mining spatial association rules from geographic databases requires at least three main steps: compute spatial relationships, generate frequent patterns, and extract association rules. The first step is the most effort demanding and time consuming task in the rule mining process, but has received little attention in the literature. The second and third steps have been considered the main problem in transactional association rule mining and have been addressed as two different problems: frequent pattern mining and association rule mining. Well known geographic dependences which generate well known patterns may appear in the three main steps of the spatial association rule mining process. Aiming to eliminate well known dependences and generate more interesting patterns, this thesis presents a framework with three main methods for mining frequent geographic patterns using knowledge constraints. Semantic knowledge is used to avoid the generation of patterns that are previously known as non-interesting. The first method reduces the input problem, and all well known dependences that can be eliminated without loosing information are removed in data preprocessing. The second method eliminates combinations of pairs of geographic objects with dependences, during the frequent set generation. A third method presents a new approach to generate non-redundant frequent sets, the maximal generalized frequent sets without dependences. This method reduces the number of frequent patterns very significantly, and by consequence, the number of association rules.